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September 2012

The 1st Ocean Radar Conference for Asia (ORCA):
Certainly Not the Last

Ocean-monitoring using HF radar technology is truly a niche field due in part to the large area coverage that can be
achieved with very few units. Inside any country one can find at most an elite handful of persons with direct experience
working with such systems and data outputs. But as the number of HF radar installations has increased over the past
decade, some countries have achieved wide area coverage with national networks, and this brings potential for providing useful
data to a large number of organizations who can exploit for improved decision making in a variety of operational pursuits,
including search and rescue, pollution spill response,
fisheries management, efficient vessel navigation, tsunami
observing and more.

1st ORCA participants

1st ORCA sponsors

Operations and maintenance, management, processing,
quality control and interpretation of HF radar data --
tasks to be resolved prior to packaging data appropriately
for supporting decision making activities -- are issues that
brought together 62 persons from 10 countries in Seoul,
South Korea this past May at the 1st Ocean Radar
Conference for Asia. This three day event hosted by the
Korea Ocean Radar Forum (KORF) was a tremendous
success in both technical content and as well as making
progress in the ORCA event purpose: “building
relationships across national boundaries to help foster the
development and growth of HF radar observation
networks along the Asian seas”.

ORCA events are expected to occur every two years, with
venue moving to different asian locations, the 2nd ORCA
tentatively scheduled for Spring 2014.